OSI Grantee Intercentre Launches "Cross-Cultural Understanding and Peace in North Caucasus" Project

The Russian NGO Intercentre has launched a two-year project, "Cross-Cultural Understanding and Peace in North Caucasus," aimed at consolidating and disseminating expertise gained during projects run in the North Caucasus in the area of cross-cultural school ethos, and prevention of violence and bullying in schools.

It builds upon the legacy of the North Caucasus Education Initiative (NCEI), run by the British Council in 2005-2007, and aims to increase the number of schools with tolerant, multicultural ethos in republics that had participated in NCEI (North Ossetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, and Ingushetia), as well as roll out the expertise of such schools into three new republics of the North Caucasus: Dagestan, Adygeia, and Chechen Republic.

Intercentre will run a series of training sessions for schools and create an in-service training program which will be piloted and then used by local authorities. Another thrust of the project is to create a facility for children of different ethnicities of the North Caucasus. The project will encourage schools to develop transformation plans in which multicultural policies will be identified.

The most important project partners will be the Moscow School of Socio-Economic Studies, the Ministry of Education of North Ossetia, the Ministry of Education of Kabardino-Balkaria, the Ministry of Education of Ingushetia: Krasnoyarsk Institute of Developmental Pedagogy, and the parents of the children.

The project is supported by the OSI Education Support Program.

For more information, please contact Elena Lenskaya, head of the projects and development unit, lenskaya@universitas.ru, or Svetlana Kuzmina, PR@universitas.ru.